You are here

Julianne Brienza

Audio Tabs

Julianne Brienza: …and we have a pretty relaxed vibe, and I really try to create that with the aesthetics of how everything looks. That it's not too polished, it's not super dirty, but it's, sort of, a cross between the two, and also an artistic environment. So we always have murals and try to do colorful things.

Jo Reed: That is the founder and the CEO and President of the Capital Fringe Festival, Julianne Brienza. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed.

Every July, Washington DC comes alive with performances—More than 100 productions in 20 venues fill the streets with theater, music, live performance of all stripes, visual art and various combinations of the above. It’s the Capital Fringe Festival—geared to give artists the chance and freedom to create and develop their vision, and audiences the opportunity to be adventurous and support independent performers. Launching in 2006, Capital Fringe is now the 2nd largest unjuried Fringe Festival in the United States. Since its inception, it’s premiered over 600 new works of contemporary performance, generated over 1.7 million dollars in revenue for the participating artists, entertained over 171,000 people in locations from traditional theaters to vacant storefronts and created close to 500 paid positions for DC residents. Three years ago, Capital Fringe took the bold step of buying a building and creating the Logan Fringe Arts Space—a year-round multi-use arts facility and community gathering place. While it does take a village to put on a festival, the driving force of Capital Fringe is its founder and President Julianne Brienza—who moved to Washington DC in 2003 and frankly found the city a little stodgy.

Julianne Brienza: Honestly, I moved here and I took a job to not work in theater anymore. <laughs I was not successful at that. I found it, honestly, really debilitating here. At that time in D.C., there’s just lot of suits, a lot of gray. Unearthing things as far as what was local, was challenging. This is like before Facebook and everything that we sort of take for granted now, and I had lived in Philadelphia for three years and worked the Fringe Festival there and it was honestly how I met people that are still friends to this day and how I really discovered what the voice of theater was in that city, and so myself and Damian Sinclair, who worked at the time at Wooly Mammoth, who I’d also known in Philadelphia, we decided this would be a good thing.

Jo Reed: Julianne, explain what a Fringe Festival is. We hear about it all the time, but what is it?

Julianne Brienza: Fringe Festival originated in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1947, when the locals were not allowed to participate in the big international festival that was happening, and so they decided to do shows wherever they could, whether it be alleyways, churches, bars, and a journalist named Robert Kemp wrote in the newspaper that the big international festival was getting fringe, and that group of artists took that word and created the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which is actually celebrating its 70th anniversary this year.

Jo Reed: That’s exciting.

Julianne Brienza: And it is the, you know, the largest arts festival in the world, and that mentality of locals, raw, fast and ready performances, has really spread all over the globe. You know, just this week we celebrated the actual day when the 70th anniversary was and fringe festivals from all over the world did this live Google hangout all day long. There’s now almost 500 individual festivals all around the world.

Jo Reed: What do you think the appeal of Fringe Festivals is?

Julianne Brienza: Well, I think by city and country, it really does vary. But I think something that is an intrinsic value that is across the globe is that they’re accessible. Whether it be a participation fee that the artist is paying, whether it be the entrance fee that the audience is paying. But I think also it’s the way that it’s accessible, that it’s not how a lot of people think of theater as an elitist activity and that it’s super intellectualized, that it actually is storytelling, and it actually is stories that are oftentimes new plays, new ideas, working through what’s happening in the current times, and so I think that that’s the connection and most, most Fringe Festivals have smaller houses. I mean, it does, range. I mean, Edinburgh festival’s like huge now and they have, like, you know, 3,000 shows that happen during the month but <laughs it’s intimacy as well, and being in an environment where you will find like-minded people that you can meet for the first time or reconnect with and so there’s that networking that happens. So I really think it’s accessibility.

Jo Reed: Well, how did you go about creating Capital Fringe? How did you start?

Julianne Brienza: Honestly, we just started meeting with a lot of people and talking about it, and we were sort of far along in the process. Like, I don’t know if we’d-- I don’t remember if we’d actually submitted our 501c3 but we were, like, close to submitting that paperwork and so we got a $30,000 grant from the Meyer Foundation and we got a $30,000 grant from the Cafritz Foundation, and without that support, it wouldn’t have happened, basically. So a lot of it was really good timing, because it was at a time where, like, the Chinatown redevelopment had just finished and we were downtown, so the Downtown D.C. BID was also very supportive, and the theater community at that time had a desire, to have a place to congregate and meet one another and try things that you wouldn’t be able to do in any other capacity with another organization.

Jo Reed: So how many shows that first year and how many venues?

Julianne Brienza: The first year we had 96 productions.

Jo Reed: Whoa.

Julianne Brienza: I know, right? I really used Philadelphia as sort of our, you know, how they, when they started, and their first year they had 50, so I thought, you know, when we were doing the budget I was like, “Well, we’ll estimate that we’ll have 50, because that’ll be good,” and we ended up having 96 and it was crazy. I’ll be honest. I think that year we either had 11 or 12 venues. Something like that. I still, I distinctly remember the first year, we got to rent a lot of lighting and sound equipment and all that stuff, and I remember we were driving down New York Avenue and we actually pulled up on the sidewalk because we just really didn’t know what we were doing. <laughs We just like pulled up on a sidewalk and just kind of caught our breath for a minute and we’re like, “Okay. This is the plan.”

<laughter

Julianne Brienza: But the festival over the years has sort of ebbed and flow. I think at our largest, we had about 140 productions in the festival. This year, you know we recently bought a building in the northeast to sort of explore having a year-round operation and the festival is really challenging in the neighborhood that we bought our building in.

Julianne Brienza: It’s really interesting the things that I thought about before and now I’m realizing after we’ve been in the neighborhood now for three years, it’s really different doing the festival in a neighborhood that doesn’t have an organizing body like a BID.

Jo Reed: Like a BID?

Julianne Brienza: Yeah, like a Business Improvement District.

Jo Reed: Oh, okay.

Julianne Brienza: To really find people who will actually care about what you’re doing and who you’re bringing to the neighborhood and what a partnership is, is very different.

Jo Reed: So you’re kind of starting from scratch.

Julianne Brienza: Yes and no. It’s, so this year what I did is every year we’ve been in the new neighborhood. We’ve been in Trinidad and H Street Northeast and then had an additional neighborhood. The first year we were in Brookland, which is around Catholic University. The second year we went back downtown. But the whole way to do a successful festival is to have everything within a walking radius. That’s like Festival 101. So this year I actually made the festival smaller so that all of our venues are within a 5- to 10-minute walk from the festival hub. So this year we have about 90 productions in the festival. They’re doing 454 individual performances.

Jo Reed: Which is still considerable.

Julianne Brienza: It feels different to me, but I don’t know that anyone else really notices that it’s smaller. <laughs In all honesty.

<laughter

Jo Reed: How do you choose what shows?

Julianne Brienza: This year because of the wanting to make it smaller I did tweak the entrance a little bit, but primarily it’s first-come, first-served, up to what we can accommodate in our venues, and as long as you’re not doing a show that is personally shaming to someone and harmful, like, if I were to do a show saying that-- and my whole show was based around wanting to kill you, that, that isn’t allowed. You know, just because people want to do a lot of different things. <laughs

Jo Reed: Mm-hm.

Julianne Brienza: And, I sort of learned that from the Minnesota Fringe Festival, just different things that they sort of had to deal with there. But it’s first-come, first-served and this year what we did up until the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, you got entered into the Lottery of Chance. <laughs

Jo Reed: Is that really what it’s called?

Julianne Brienza: That’s what I called it, yeah.

Jo Reed: Oh.

Julianne Brienza: It was the Lottery of Chance.

Jo Reed: That’s a great name.

Julianne Brienza: And the chance was you may or may not get in.

Jo Reed: Uh-huh.

Julianne Brienza: And then what we did with the people that entered after that time, we really just took what we could accommodate. I mean, it was pretty much first-come, first-served, but it was really what would fit into the venues after we had done the first-come, first-served.

Jo Reed: And that was exactly my question, because if I have a production with 25 people--

Julianne Brienza: Yeah, we may have more room in the solo performance venue.

Jo Reed: Right. Exactly, that’s a lot to think about.

Julianne Brienza: It’s all a lot to think about.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I’m sure.

<laughter

Jo Reed: It’s all a lot to think--

<laughter

Jo Reed: It’s pretty daunting.

Jo Reed: Do you work, at all, with the artists who are presenting?

Julianne Brienza: Oh, my God, so much, yes, absolutely. So we do a lot of training. So it really starts right off, we do-- we have a about a 40-page "How to Fringe" handbook that walks through how the box office works. We have a whole marketing section, how to prepare your printed materials, your blurbs, your images; tips on how to write copy, how to be concise, what words to not use; production, how to minimize things, how to really think through so many details that no one really thinks about. That it is hot in the summer here and even though you are in an air-conditioned venue, you really need to be thinking about how your cast is getting to and from, and safety and all that stuff. So we do in-person trainings. We do a full-- it's all production related, and then we do marketing, and then with marketing, we also talk about the box office. And it just continues on through the festival. Because we deal with a lot of folks that may have never done a show before. Maybe they have done a show, but they haven't done a show here. So they need to have different tips about the type of audiences that are here in DC, and just different ways of, like, how to communicate. So just proper professional communication, we do a lot of that sort of training.

Jo Reed: And I would imagine logistically, if people have any kind of a set, it's like how you can get it up quickly and how you can take it down quickly. Because you're following a show and another show...

Julianne Brienza: Well, one thing we changed—you know for, I guess, 11 years we had, it was a real strict 15 minutes in and 15 minutes out. But what I've noticed is that that doesn't really necessarily work anymore, and who we're not servicing is the technical theater community. You know, it's a job where you do lots of different jobs to actually make a living. So this year, we actually changed the way in which we programmed things, and people have 20 to 30 minutes to load in and load out. I've noticed-- I guess, today we're officially one week in. But I've gotten less crazy calls. <laughs But it is challenging, because at each of our spaces, on one stage, we have 12 groups, and so we set up a slack channel in which the artists could communicate with one another to see if they wanted to share anything, and then it's up to our production manager and then the venue manager to really coordinate, not just that everything gets stored, but that everything is fair. Because that is something that is really critical in the festival is that someone is not put over someone else. Like, if we can do something for one person, we have to do it for everybody. Because of the way that the ticket revenue is, we can't give an unfair advantage to someone else. Because it is an earning opportunity for artists, because they do make a percentage of the ticket revenue. Which is a real balance. <laughs

Jo Reed: That must be a real balance...

Julianne Brienza: It means we say no a lot.

Jo Reed: And I would think for so many artists, it's also-- it's such a heightened moment for so many of them. So...

Julianne Brienza: There is. I've had people yell at me a lot. Like a lot, and yell at my staff a lot, in moments of crisis that really are not a crisis. It's really just how people deal with stress. And so a lot of what I train my staff to do is to realize that we don't need to get upset. We don't need to apologize, unless we have made an error. But to really take a breath and realize when someone is agitated, to really take into consideration where they're coming from. Because a lot of the people that we have participating in our programs are doing multiple jobs, are getting a lot of email, and they may miss something, and we have to be aware of that. Otherwise, it's just not-- I mean, we're just going to be fighting all the time. <laughs

Jo Reed: So you have about 90 shows?

Julianne Brienza: Correct.

Jo Reed: What's the length of time? For the shows, what’s the average running time?

Julianne Brienza: Yeah, so we, you know, it was so funny, the other week there was an article in the Washington Post about intermissions, and everyone was talking about intermissions and how annoying they are at theater. So we don't allow intermissions, never have. Most of our work is 60 to 90 minutes long. A lot of Fringe Festivals say how long your show has to be, because it is a rapid fashion and things have to happen, and you've got venue schedules. It's very similar to a train schedule. You can't get off schedule, or then you're delayed for the rest of the day. I've never limited the time. But because of the no intermission-- we used to have shows that were, like, 120 minutes, which is just too long for the environment that we're in. So really, there's only a handful of 90-minute shows. Everything is like 60 to 75 minutes.

Julianne Brienza: Every year of the Capital Fringe Festival, we’ve had 50 percent or higher of our artists living in the District of Columbia. Last year for the first time and at the, you know, was our 11th year. It was like 39 percent lived in the district. I feel like I should know the numbers this year, but I don’t think I’ve actually looked at them, because I don’t want to know. <laughs I want to be ignorant right now. I will look at them once we sort of wrap up the festival to do the whole report, but that’s, to me that’s significant.

Jo Reed: What do you think accounts for that change?

Julianne Brienza: A lot of the issues is space in the district. I mean, it’s not just the need for studio space or performance space or rehearsal space or practice space for a band.

Jo Reed: <Inaudible.

Julianne Brienza: It’s living.

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Julianne Brienza: And affordable housing, as much as the various administrations talk about dealing with it, there’s a need that’s really not being filled, and what will happen, and it is happening now, is people are just going to move away, and that, that actually affects what I do a great deal, because part of our mission at Capital Fringe is to service the local community. But if the local community doesn’t exist, <laughs what do we do? Do we just become a presenter? To be an artist living in the District of Columbia, that that’s how you make your money, if you’re that person, I’d love to talk to you. <laughs It’s a rare thing.

Julianne Brienza: So we bought a tent in 2008. It was called a Baldacchino Tent. It's about 3000 square feet. Half of it was a bar, half of it was an 80-seat theater venue, and then, because the parking lot was so large-- and it came with a patio. We also had a patio. And then, as time progressed, we also got café seating on the sidewalk. I never actually got the permit for that because I thought it was ridiculous, because the sidewalk was so long-- I mean, it was so wide. So I never actually got the permit because I was, like, "I'm already doing the tent permit and that's, like, $5000. Please come tell me to get off the sidewalk," which no one ever did. And that was a really critical place for artists to be able to come, pitch their shows, but also, people just can talk to each other, and we have a pretty relaxed vibe, and I really try to create that with the aesthetics of how everything looks. That it's not too polished, it's not super dirty, but it's, sort of, a cross between the two, and also an artistic environment. So we always have murals and try to do colorful things.

And even in our new location, we do have a courtyard, outdoor bar, and then we have an indoor bar, as well, which also serves as a gallery, and so we do still have that place where people can come just, kind of, check in, see who's there, meet someone new. I mean, it's been really fun, over the years. You know, people do meet for the first time at the Fringe Festival, and they continue to be friends and it's, sort of, fun. We've had a couple of marriages.

Jo Reed: Fringe marriages?

Julianne Brienza: Yeah. And then, we also do run a bar and we try to keep things priced pretty low, so that-- I don't know. If you go out for a drink nowadays, it's pretty expensive. So it is a way that we can just create an atmosphere where people of varying different incomes really hang out.

Jo Reed: And are you seeing that?

Julianne Brienza: Absolutely. You know, it's something that I think when we first got the tent, I would have this thing I'd say, like, "There's people of all different backgrounds hanging out." And that was my hope. But then, it actually really happens. There are people that are just not people that would ever be together, that end up in the same place and they end up hanging out, and I think that's pretty cool for Washington, DC.

Jo Reed: Your background. You’re not from here. You’re from--

Julianne Brienza: I’m not.

Jo Reed: Where are you from?

Julianne Brienza: I grew up in Montana.

Jo Reed: In the countryside?

Julianne Brienza: I grew up in Dillon, Montana. It’s about an hour south of Butte, which is typically a place people have heard of. It’s in the southwest corner. It’s about two hours north of the Gardiner Gate to Yellowstone. When I was growing up it was a town of, like, 3,000 people. Now there’s, like, six or seven thousand people that live there, but it is the county seat and it is the largest county in Montana. East Coast perspective, it’s the middle of nowhere.

Jo Reed: <laughs

Julianne Brienza: When I went to the orthodontist, it was a two-hour drive there and a two-hour drive back.

Jo Reed: And your family were people interested in theater? How did you become interested--

Julianne Brienza: No.

Jo Reed: --in theater?

Julianne Brienza: I don’t even really know anymore. No. My father is a visual artist. He does glass blowing, jewelry making, he does pottery. I’m the youngest of five, too. My brother runs an advertising agency and then my sister is a graphic designer. I don’t really know. My sister was in a play. I was three years old. She was in a play and I somehow got involved and I was Helen Keller’s, like, something, like, niece that would, like, sit there because I was like a baby. I always liked doing theater, and we had the Montana Vaudeville Players, which was basically like a summer stock, so a lot of college students would go and do it and when I was in high school I was like, “Well, that’s what I’m going to do.” So I went and auditioned and I actually got a part and it was a really awesome experience. I mean, it was basically a small theater so we were in charge of-- I was in the shows. Then, we had the-- you know, first, we'd open with the melodrama. Then, we'd do intermission, and we had to go sell concessions, and then we'd go and do the Vaudeville portion, where we would sing and dance, and it was a really, really fun experience, with an organ and all that sort of stuff. It was really fun.

Jo Reed: It sounds like it's good training for Fringe, doing everything.

Julianne Brienza: I know, right? Well, that is-- I did grow up in a household that you had to-- like, we didn't get an allowance. I had to negotiate for why I needed money to do "X." And, we did, I think growing up in that, sort of, rule environment, you do things-- like, we would sweep the gutters outside, on the street and that kind of stuff. It's just a different environment.

Jo Reed: Mm-hm. It's what you did.

Julianne Brienza: Yeah, it's what you did. <laughs

Jo Reed: What brought you to Philadelphia?

Julianne Brienza: I went to college in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and I got out of college with a theater degree and had no idea what to do. So I went and lived in my sister's basement in Chicago and attempted various jobs, and then, I ended up moving. A friend of mine was running a newspaper in Carroll, Iowa. He was the editor, and I ended up going there for nine months and was their graphic designer and also, ended up running a political campaign for a man running for the Iowa Legislature, as one does. And then, you know, I woke up and I was like, "What am I doing?" So I applied for apprenticeships and internships all over the country, and I got hired at the Arden Theater Company in Philadelphia to be an Arden apprentice, which is, basically, a program that's nine months long and you learn how to run a non-profit theater, and it's, like, 80-hour weeks and super intense. But I really loved it. I learned so much there, and they're a really well run organization with an awesome staff morale and consistency of leadership. It really changed my life. It was a really great opportunity and it was also-- the theater community in Philadelphia is one that is really strong. A lot of the regional theaters there have the mentality that hiring local first is important and that sort of stuff. I really loved Philly. It was good. But then, you know, I wanted to go somewhere else and not work in theater, at some point.

Jo Reed: Why did you want to leave the theater?

Julianne Brienza: It’s sort of tiring, working at a regional, because I was working in regional theater. It’s just, the business model I found really laborious – just with the…

Jo Reed: It's a lot of fundraising.

Julianne Brienza: Just the subscriptions and, like, all this stuff, I just was, like, "Is this it? This is what I'm doing?" I've never really had the temperament to be an actor. I did get interested in puppetry for a while, and one year, on my tax return, it reads that I was a Puppeteer because that was how I made the majority of my, like, non-existent income. So I've always really been interested in places where artists get together, like whether it's artists in residency program or that sort of thing, where people have to come and create and you, sort of, help them and talk through strategies and stuff. So I came to DC to work at Flashpoint, which is run by Cultural DC. It was called The Cultural Development Corporation at that time. So I ran their Flashpoint program when I first moved here. My goal was to have a job for two years, but I only made it a year and nine months and I left and started Fringe.

Jo Reed: And started Fringe.

Julianne Brienza: I was close to that goal, but I missed it.

Jo Reed: You know, you also created the Logan Fringe Arts Space, and you own that building.

Julianne Brienza: We do.

Jo Reed: What was the thinking behind that?

Julianne Brienza: One thing that’s challenging in D.C. for the theater community is space, and, you know, with various other venues closing, being cost-prohibitive and regional theaters not really making their space available, we felt that Capital Fringe was in a position to service the community in that manner and we were losing our location. We didn’t own the building and it’s, you know, it was 20,000-square-feet. Like, we’re not going to have that forever. I’m actually still amazed that we were in there for eight years.

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Julianne Brienza: That’s like Doug Jemal, thank you very much.

Jo Reed: <laughs

Julianne Brienza: So, the plan is that next year we will go into a renovation of some sort to just better utilize the square footage that we have, and then also we’re going through a big strategic planning process, because outside of the festival we’re actually generating more new audiences, at Logan Fringe Art Space, that are not theater, and they don’t really know anything about theater. They’re either music--

Jo Reed: Music.

Julianne Brienza: --or creative events or visual arts, and so we have a lot of opportunity to grow, but we do need to have some, we do need to gain some perspective.

Jo Reed: And did buying that building enable you to sort of branch out that way? Or were you heading in that direction?

Julianne Brienza: We were heading in that direction already. We really started going year-round activity in about 2010, and then-- and I’m, I’m sort of more of a all arts person. I have a Visual Art degree as well as a Theater degree. I have not always just been totally theater, so I, I like doing all of the things and I like the perspective that is gained from speaking and dealing with and servicing each community. Then, also, I’m working on the festival so that, one, it can continue to grow; we can continue to grow artists, not continue to get smaller but continue to add artists and also add audiences; and so I'm in the process of figuring that out, as well. We’ll just have to wait and see where all the pieces fall.

Jo Reed: And I think there we'll leave it. Julianne, thank you so much.

Julianne Brienza: Thank you.

Jo Reed: I appreciate it.

Jo Reed: That’s founder and CEO and President of the Capital Fringe Festival, Julianne Brienza. Capital Fringe continues through July 30 in WDC—for more information—go to capitalfringe.org. You’ve been listening to Art Works produces at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter.

For the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.